VANCOUVER - Nietzsche said for art to exist, one physiological precondition is indispensable: Intoxication.

Interestingly, the very same could be said for the Hollywood sub-genre of comedy known as the “stag party” movie, which usually revolves around one clay-footed groom getting good and drunk with his best buds before tying the knot to some irritable — and usually irritating — bimbo.

Now, given the Nietzschean nexus between art and drunkenness, one might be tempted to draw a similar relationship between art and the stag movie, but finding real substance at the bottom of a boozy buddy formula is a tall order — even when the buddies get a novel treatment from the writers and the formula finds a different denominator.

The Hangover may be the closest thing to a veritable rewrite of stag party debauchery, but for all its welcome twists and freshness, it’s still just a movie about a bunch of guys who got way, way, way too wasted.

In a nutshell, Doug (Justin Bartha) is about to get married, but before he and his true love exchange rings and vows, he heads off to Las Vegas in his father-in-law’s vintage Mercedes with his best friends Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Stu (Ed Helms), and his soon-to-be brother-in-law Alan (Zach Galifianakis).

From the moment the boys pour themselves into the rare and much-loved automobile, we know the car will not survive. We also know the manly foursome will most likely miss the wedding, scheduled to take place just 48 hours later.

What we can’t know is all the bad stuff destined to take place in between, and that’s where director Todd Phillips (Old School) and writers Jon Lucas and Scott Moore rack up most of their pioneer mileage in The Hangover because the actual details of the debauchery drive the plot.

All we really see in sequence is the boys arriving at the hotel, having their first cocktail on the roof of Caesar’s Palace, and waking up the next morning — all of which takes place in the first 15 minutes of screen time.

The movie really kicks into gear the moment the fellas wake up in their luxury suite, which is now littered with undergarments, farm animals and unidentifiable bodily fluids.

Stu, Phil and Alan can’t remember a thing. They’re also missing Doug, the groom. As the moss in their mouths begins to moisten, they realize they’re going to have to reconstruct the evening’s shenanigans if they’re ever going to find their best friend and get him to the church on time.

Since the plot essentially ticks backward as the partiers connect the dots, The Hangover is able to escape the standard pitfalls of debauchery denouement, where the audience is left to play voyeur to someone else’s brand of unbridled fun.

Sure, there’s fun to be had in watching insecure pubescent losers ogle boobies and barf, but there’s actually far more fun to be had in watching three grown men come to grips with the consequences of their own actions.

Not only are the reaction shots priceless, the audience is spared the vulgarities of the actual moment, releasing us from any moral position and giving us full permission to engage with the emerging memories of depravity.

Let’s face it, it’s way more fun to watch someone remember all the bad things they did the night before than actually do them.

Ramping up the entertainment value on these gradual revelations is the fact that each one of these four revellers is, in normal life, a relatively mature man with a real job and a genuine understanding of responsibility. They aren’t idiots, but they acted like true imbeciles on their special night together, and now they each have to choke down a piece of humble pie — from returning a baby to breaking up an overnight marriage.

At times, Phillips plays it so close to the edge it’s almost unfeeling to laugh, but he saves the raunchier details through mood and by capturing the surreal edge to any Las Vegas trip, where the combination of bright desert sun, free booze, plastic bodies and abstract money will always push a mortal to the crap table of fate.

kmonk@canwest.com

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